Liberals get apoplectic at the mention of the Koch brothers and, by the same token, conservatives gag at the mention of George Soros.

Yet, it can be argued, another rich man might have had a much larger effect on the politics of this century: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is the uber publisher and broadcaster of our time, and manipulator of public opinion. In Britain, he is courted by prime ministers and in the United States by politicians, left and right. Since the emergence of Fox News as the champion of the angry white voter, he has been the comfort and the looking glass of one Donald Trump.

Murdoch is a phenomenon. He is courageous, opportunistic and blessed with an unparalleled ability to divine the often-hidden aspirations of his readers and viewers.

He also does not care what people think. That may be his greatest strength. He does what he damn well pleases and his success at doing that is played out on the world stage. He has gained the social and cultural recognition of media supremacy but has not sought them.

He loves making newspapers, making television, making money and making trouble.

His British newspapers — more than half the people who read a newspaper in Britain read one owned by a Murdoch company — backed Britain’s seemingly suicidal vote to leave the European Union.

The tone of his anti-European ravings was summed up on Nov. 1, 1990, when Britain turned its back on European monetary union with the now famous front-page headline “Up Yours Delors!” in The Sun, Britain’s largest circulation daily newspaper. At the time, Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission.

The Sun was not content just with its headline: It advised all its readers to turn toward Europe and make an obscene gesture. Not exactly sophisticated reasoning, but good at getting the nationalistic sap up.

The same thing you can get on Fox day after day from Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham, and the thin gruel of reason served up by the breakfast team. Gruel, it must be noted, that is nourishment and justification to President Trump.

I still marvel at what amounted to Murdoch’s conquest of British newspaper publishing. It was genius: He identified a right-wing, jingoistic streak in the British working-class male and he went for it with chauvinistic fury — and naked female breasts on Page 3. Murdoch’s legendary conservatism did not extend to women in front of the camera. If raunchy sold, raunchy it would be.

It paid off and enabled Murdoch later to take over the legendary Sunday Times and daily Times and to finance his American adventure, where something of the same formula applied to cable television has been diabolically effective.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain played a key role in the Brexit vote. It is less clear whether Fox played a role in Trump’s election, but it did not hurt. The trick in publishing or broadcasting to an ideological base, a conservative strategist once told me, is to keep the faithful, not to change minds. More troubling is the effect Fox has as an enabler for Trump’s more egregious actions, and his banal but damaging attacks on the media.

Fox floats the idea the mainstream media is a kind of monolithic, left-wing conspiracy and Trump amplifies it. Between Fox and Trump, they toss the mendacities back and forth until the authorship is lost. It is awesome to think mainstream can be turned into a pejorative just through repetition.

Murdoch is a conservative, except in journalistic vulgarity and when it is advantageous to go left, as he did in Britain when he backed Tony Blair and Labor in 1997. In New York, he cultivated the Clintons — maybe as insurance, maybe just as the entitlement to know power that goes along with his own power, or he may just have liked them.

Having been curious about Murdoch and his ways — and at times lost in admiration — since he figuratively invaded Britain in 1969 and seen the good and the bad that followed, I think he toys with politicians and is amused by his ability to influence events. Not much more and not much less.

There is a British expression for stirring things up: putting a bit of stick about. No one has put more stick about than Murdoch and he is not done. Tune in to Fox tonight and just see.

Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States.

While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which the empire stands now that he has sold 21st Century Fox Entertainment to Disney.

I believe the two pillars are linked by what amounts to the Murdoch formula: find a chauvinistic, nationalistic vein and mine it.

Murdoch blew on the embers of resentment and stoked the fires of tribalism through The Sun, his big British moneymaker, and Fox News, his American gold mine.

He understood this social stratum, whether it was in working-class Britain or spread across what we now call the red states in America. This audience felt ignored, put upon and unloved. Its traditional champions on the left — the unions, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party — had condescended to it, but not celebrated it.

Murdoch articulated its frustrations and gave them voice not where you would expect it on the left, but on the right.

A new and exceptional book by Irwin Stelzer, “The Murdoch Method,” lays out how Murdoch did this and how he holds his empire together. Stelzer should know. He has been a friend and consultant to Murdoch and his many enterprises for 35 years.

Stelzer, who I have known for 45 years, is worthy of a book in his own right. When he met Murdoch, he had already achieved success enough for many a man. He founded National Economic Research Associates and sold it well. Then, after a stint with Rothschild in New York, he enjoyed running an energy program at Harvard. Then came Murdoch.

Stelzer worked so closely with Murdoch that a rival newspaper in London described him as “Murdoch’s man on earth.” And he was.

He was sometimes the go-between for British prime ministers and leading American figures, from Richard Nixon to Richard Cheney. Stelzer made Murdoch’s case to the mighty, and he crunched numbers. Money and the power of media made this world go around.

As the title suggests, Stelzer explains in his book how Murdoch manages so diverse a company as News Corp. and how he created and grew it from the newspapers he inherited from his formidable father, Sir Keith Murdoch, in out-of-the-way Adelaide, Australia.

What emerges is a portrait of man who thinks of himself as an outsider, a loner: a practitioner of a kind of minimalist management out to war against the establishment and its elites.

Murdoch, both as a publisher and a businessman, has been incredibly courageous. He flipped The Sun from timid left to truculent right. He also stripped the brassieres off the models on Page 3. Chauvinism, sex and celebrity gossip was what Murdoch offered, and the public could not get enough. He also broke the British print unions in a near-military move to a secret printing site in Wapping, East London, in January 1986.

In America, Murdoch pretty well failed with newspapers he purchased in San Antonio, Boston and Chicago. He has not exactly succeeded with The New York Post, but he keeps it going as a personal indulgence. He is doing well with The Wall Street Journal. Fox News is the jewel in his American crown.

Stelzer’s Murdoch and his method is one of a small executive staff: excellent executives who are very well paid and prepared to answer a call from their boss day and night. He let really gifted people, like Roger Ailes of Fox, run their enterprises until there was a scandal and then, bang, the locks were changed, and settlements were paid. Murdoch is generous and ruthless.

Murdoch and Stelzer were in a way made for each other, although they did argue and sometimes Stelzer lost, only to find out just how wrong he was — as when he opposed the creation of the Fox Business Network.

Stelzer acknowledges he does not like everything Murdoch does; and he should not. Murdoch has treated the world as a playground where you make money by making damaging mischief — so you hire people like Sean Hannity and tolerate the inanity. Or you court the Clintons, but back Trump.

Stelzer has been on a wild ride and he takes you along in clear, readable prose.

I was lucky enough to snag the first, and I believe only, print interview with Foxcliffe Hickory Wind, the Scottish deerhound who won “best in show” from the Westminster Kennel Club. The great lady — and 5-year-old Hickory is awesome — had just opened the New York Stock Exchange, appeared on all the morning television shows, and was being pursued by a posse of paparazzi. But that is to be expected when you are a star in New York.

Me: What do you like about New York?

Hickory: Pastrami sandwiches.

Me: What do you dislike about New York?

Hickory: There’s nowhere to run. Do you know that in rough country we can outrun a greyhound, anorexic creatures that they are?

Me: How far back does your family go?

Hickory: In Scotland, into prehistoric times. We brought down the red deer that fed the Picts and the clans before bows and arrows. That’s breeding, man.

Me: You don’t grant many interviews to newspapers, but you’ve gone from television studio to studio. Why is that?

Hickory: I like to control the message. You guys get it wrong.

Me: When you went up the Empire State Building and looked down, what impressed you?

Hickory: There’s nowhere to go to the bathroom without people watching. My heart went out to those poor creatures on leashes going up and down Park Avenue looking for, you know, the spot. Dreadful.

Me: What did you think of Central Park?

Hickory: Nothing to chase there except bicycles. No deer, no rabbits, not even one of those miniature degenerates you see in the expensive hotels. Anyway, three bounds and you’ve outrun them.

Me: You’re clearly very proud of your Scottish heritage, have you ever been to Scotland?

Hickory: No. I live in the Virginia Hunt Country and it’s the next best thing: loads of deer, squirrels, rabbits and low-slung, rodent-type things, like possums and woodchucks. Don’t run. Always going into holes. Not at all sporting.

I eschew foxes. I can tell you, I’m even apprehensive about Fox News. The stupid cousins, foxhounds, chase them and kill them sometimes. But really, I like my meals served in my bowl at home. No need to kill things in the Age of Alpo.

Me: You don’t live far from Washington and President Obama has a dog, a Portuguese water dog, named Bo. Would he interest you romantically?

Hickory: Wash your mouth out with soap. I wouldn’t run around a barn with a Portuguese water dog. And that name! It’s not much better than being called Spot. I have many names because I’m an aristocrat and I live in Virginia with other aristos, canine and equine. Soon I’ll marry a dog with a name like McTavish Ben Nevis Peebles MacDonald-Smith. We’ll have beautiful puppies which will have even longer names and will be bought by billionaires for big, folding money.

Me: What is your biggest indulgence?

Hickory: When nobody’s looking, I roll in manure. Oooh, it’s good fun. But they do kick up a fuss with shouting, baths and the pointed finger. I just look at them and think: Poor things, without me they would be nothing.

Me: What’s your favorite dinner?

Hickory: Venison, of course. Have you forgotten, I’m a deerhound? Also, I love Walker’s shortbread; all butter, sugar, flour — and very Scottish. But they don’t like me to have it. I don’t know why, considering that I’ve brought such credit on them and joy into their lives. Live a little, I say!

Me: On a delicate matter, one doesn’t usually expect a beauty queen to have coarse hair, a beard and whiskers. How do you feel about, well, being so hairy?

Hickory: That’s rude and I could bite your throat out! But right now, could you scratch behind my ears?

That’s better. You don’t have one of those pastrami sandwiches with you, do you? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The great television event of this winter is not what happens with Jay Leno and the late-night crew at NBC. Rather it is Sarah Palin signing on as a contributor for the top-rated Fox News Channel.

In her maiden run on Fox, Palin delighted her admirers and confirmed the negative view of her by those who watched “The O’Reilly Factor” just to see if the former Alaska governor would make a spectacle of herself.

When Palin dismissed allegations about her shortcomings as John McCain’s 2008 running mate in the new book Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, as “crap,” both her followers and detractors got what they thought they wanted from the Woman Who Would Be President. Her followers saw a gutsy conservative and her detractors heard a woman who they believe to be ignorant and incapable of serious responses to serious charges.

For Palin, the real issue is what will television do for her? Will it hurt or hinder? Will it be the final nail in her political coffin as she becomes a talking head, an entertainment, a figure of fun?

To appear from time to time on television is essential for aspiring office seekers. To have a regular spot there is something else. It reveals the mind behind the face, and no politician has been able to survive or be enhanced by too much television.

If Palin doubts this, she look at her colleagues on the Fox box. Step forward Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. Or switch over to MSNBC, and see how things are going for two other former politicians: Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough.

Let us take them one at a time.

Newt Gingrich, once the fount of Republican ideas, is a somewhat reduced man on television, another pundit among many. It has not put him up in the polls as a potential Republican candidate for president.

Karl Rove, once thought to be the omnipotent brain behind President George W. Bush, has also been leveled by regular television appearances, with his insights no more compelling than those of a host of Washington commentators.

Watching Dick Morris’s lugubriousness on Fox, it is hard to believe that President Bill Clinton hung on his words, as did many other politicians. Many political reporters in Washington have as much insight.

Over at MSNBC, Pat Buchanan, some-time presidential candidate and longtime columnist, gets more air time than all the rest. This outpouring of Buchanan philosophy has not produced the slightest groundswell for him to run again.

Joe Scarborough, a former U.S. congressman, has done well as a morning television host, but nobody has suggested he should give this up and return to politics.

Television can be good for the ego but it is a career killer, unless that career is in television.

While television builds name recognition, it also breeds familiarity and robs politicians of their mystique. We do not want to know what politicians think about absolutely everything that happens every day. We want to believe they know things we do not know and think things above our understanding.

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, alone has been enhanced by appearing on Fox. But he is hosting a variety show, not just showing the variety of his opinions. He is good on television — so good that he may never run for office again. Huckabee could offer himself to any network as an accomplished entertainer and host.

Palin comes to television with a fearsome following. She has reputedly sold 2 million copies of her book, Going Rogue, has 1.5 million friends on Facebook and half a million followers on Twitter. All of those numbers are in the stratosphere.

Has there ever been such devotion to a political woman, so much homage paid to the idea of an iconoclast as a leader? It is a lot to risk for jabbing at liberals on television, along with other women who jab at liberals like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

There must be some nostalgia at CBS News for the good old days, when the network was roundly hated and people at the political extremes longed to see it fail. Now that it is failing (it is a laggard in the ratings), nobody seems to care. Gone are the conservatives, who wanted to buy the network to sanitize it and rout out alleged liberal journalists. Also gone are the political lefties, who believed that CBS was the captive of its advertisers.

In media, to be hated is an affirmation that you are succeeding.

At The Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association annual dinner this week, the happiest people were at the Fox News tables. Roger Ailes, the principal architect of Fox’s huge success as a news network, and his star host, Bill O’Reilly, were beaming—well aware that most people in the room believe that the Fox cable channel has degraded broadcast news.

It is not just CBS that is hurting, but also other traditional media as well—most especially newspapers. Marylanders used to hate The Baltimore Sun. Now they worry that their venerable newspaper is on the ropes, and may be sold to quite the wrong kind of person.

They used to say in newsrooms, “If you aren’t hated, you’re not doing this job right.” Unfortunately, the quality of hatred that most news organizations face is sadly watered down. Generalized attacks on the “liberal media” and the “mainstream media” just don’t pack much of a wallop. They tell us more about the attacker than the attacked.

Happily, two newspapers—maybe two of the three best newspapers in the country—can still agitate those who believe in media conspiracies. These are The New York Times and The Washington Post. The third is The Wall Street Journal, which has never raised the same kind of intense feeling as the other two. Its editorial page is so predictable that even liberals cannot get mad at it. And its news coverage is pretty faultless.

The two big East Coast newspapers can really get the critics going. The New York Times, through a series of terrible blunders, has opened itself up to particularly virulent criticism. The Washington Post, which sells five times as many newspapers as its nearest competitor, The Washington Times, unerringly gets the brickbats. Civil rights groups accuse it of racial insensitivity. And radio talk show hosts like to refer to it as “The Washington Compost.” Even so, the paper has just bagged six Pulitzer prizes. Particularly, it showed the whole world last year that it could still deliver great journalism by revealing the scandalous treatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have the resources to do the job right. Although The Times is in a slump, and appears to be in desperate need of an editor who has a vision and a publisher who is competent, it still triumphs on solid, day-to-day coverage of big continuing stories. Its coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis and its on-the-ground reporting out of Iraq are excellent.

Michael Wolff, the media critic of Vanity Fair, is in full pursuit of The New York Times in his May column. Wolff catalogs the humiliations the newspaper has suffered in recent times (including the Jayson Blair fictions, Judith Miller’s partisanship, and the insinuation that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist) and speculates on the possibility that the special voting stock, which gives the Sulzberger family control of the paper, may be under attack.

It may be very difficult to change the bylaws of the company, but Wolff thinks that angry shareholders could force the sale issue; or that the Sulzberger family, like the Bancroft family that used to own The Wall Street Journal, can simply be bought off. One way or the other, Wolff sees dissident shareholders changing the corporate structure of the paper.

At the same time, with a similar stock arrangement, the Graham family, greatly assisted by Warren Buffet, is firmly in control of its newspaper.

Yet, neither the Sulzbergers nor the Grahams have had huge financial successes with the properties they inherited. Both have had considerable editorial successes by lavishing resources on the papers. But as publishing ventures, the families have been timid and sometimes foolish. They profited from near monopolies, but mostly failed in diversification. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the father of the present publisher of The New York Times, confounded the publishing industry when he bought The Boston Globe. Analysts warned that two newspapers in the same advertising market would hurt more than a different kind of diversification. But the man who got it right in launching a national edition of The New York Times got it very wrong in Boston. The Globe is losing money and is a drain on The New York TimesCompany.

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, who is revered in newspaper circles, did some pretty odd things herself. She clung to Newsweek, when it could have been sold profitably; invested in newspapers in New Jersey and Washington state; and nibbled at small publishing ventures in Washington, D.C. It can be argued that it wasn’t until Buffet came onto the scene with his steadying hand—he is a large shareholder and director of the company—that The Post started hedging the risk of newspaper publishing. In particular, it bought Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, which has turned out to be a cash cow and is now more profitable than The Post.

Unlike The New York Times, The Washington Post had a clear idea of what to do with its Web pages, which are now in profit–as is Slate, the online magazine that The Post bought from Microsoft.

Nobody knows the future of newspapers. But we do know that the well-being of a democracy depends on them. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post are still making a profit, though not as much as in years past. And the public still has the energy and good sense to hate them.

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